The Ravishing Retro Art of Tom Havlasek

One of our favourite discoveries of the year, Tom Havalask’s art is emotive and stunning, and does great justice to the bombastic character of the golden age of motorsport.

Tom’s art captures the feel, power, speed and character of historic motorsport wonderfully. It’s all broad strokes, big colours and emotion and doesn’t get caught up in the search for fiddly fine details.

I was born in Brno, Czech Republic in January 1984. Since my childhood, motorsport has been part of my life and my passion, and I now live very close to the well-known Brno Circuit. As a child I was there with my father nearly every free weekend. I loved the atmosphere of races and of course am still love with it

I graduated from a secondary school with a specialization in computer graphic design, but as I progressed through my studies I prefered to hand-craft my art more and more.

I began to present my art through secondary school, which was mostly street art paintings or legal graffiti paintings, painted with spraypaint. As time passed I started to grow fond of using canvas and water-based colors, because they seemed to provide something more than street paintings.

In the last year I’ve only painted with acrylic colors, almost entirely with the palette-knife, and developed a preference for the square ratio canvas size of 95 x 95 cm.

My philosophy is simple. I find an interesting photo of a classic racing car, or find a way to make a photo of my own, then choose the aspect of the photo which inspires me and create the right composition on computer. I then transfer the motive on the canvas. I like to paint dirty, without a clear style; splashes, drops and blurs everywhere. I’m not interested in defined shadows or detail work. It could by said, that I try to conect abstract and concrete together. But the topic must be always clear and immediately recognizable what’s going on.

Portraits are another favourite of mine, especially, of course, of racing drives from the “golden age” of motorsport.

My most recent exhibition was this spring in the Classic Show 2013 in Wannieck Gallery Brno. The series of three paintings was called “Blue Series”. I’m preparing my own solo exhibition in Wellington Cafe Gallery for the fall, where I will show motorsport paintings which have been made this year.

Next year I am planning to attend some of Europe’s famous classic car meetings and show more of my art there.